The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (38 page)

It was then I realized suddenly what Holmes had been telling me. I almost gasped aloud as I understood the truth of the situation!

At that moment I saw a flash of silver and heard the sickening sound of steel entering flesh. Holmes fell back, his pistol dropping from his hand and with a cry of rage I discharged my own revolver, careless of Fellini or his art, in my belief that my friend was once again to be taken from me – this time before my eyes.

I saw Jean-Pierre Fromental, alias Linda Gallibasta, fall backwards, arms raised, and crash through the window by which he had entered. With a terrible cry he staggered, flailed at the air, then fell into an appalling silence.

At that moment, the door burst open and in came John Mackelsworth, closely followed by our old friend Inspector Lestrade, Mrs Beck and one or two other tenants of 2 Dorset Street.

“It’s all right, Watson,” I heard Holmes say, a little faintly. “Only a flesh wound. It was foolish of me not to think he could throw a Bowie-knife! Get down there, Lestrade, and see what you can do. I’d hoped to take him alive. It could be the only way we’ll be able to locate the money he has been stealing from his benefactor over all these years. Good night to you, Mr Mackelesworth. I had hoped to convince you of my solution, but I had not expected to suffer quite so much injury in the performance.” His smile was faint and his eyes were flooded with pain.

Luckily, I was able to reach my friend before he collapsed upon my arm and allowed me to lead him to a chair, where I took a look at the wound. The knife had stuck in his shoulder and, as Holmes knew, had done no permanent damage, but I did not envy him the discomfort he was suffering.

Poor Macklesworth was completely stunned. His entire notion of things had been turned topsy-turvy and he was having difficulty taking everything in. After dressing Holmes’s wound, I told Macklesworth to sit down while I fetched everyone a brandy. Both the American and myself were bursting to learn everything Holmes had deduced, but contained ourselves until my friend would be in better health. Now that the initial shock was over, however, he was in high spirits and greatly amused by our expressions.

“Your explanation was ingenious, Watson, and touched on the truth, but I fear it was not the answer. If you will kindly look in my inside jacket pocket, you will find two pieces of paper there. Would you be good enough to draw them out so that we might all see them?”

I did as my friend instructed. One piece contained the last letter Sir Geoffrey had written to John Macklesworth and, ostensibly, left with Mrs Gallibasta. The other, far older, contained the letter John Macklesworth had read out earlier that day. Although there was a slight similarity to the handwriting, they were clearly by different authors.

“You said this was the forgery,” said Holmes, holding up the letter in his left hand, “but unfortunately it was not. It is probably the only example of Sir Geoffrey’s handwriting you have ever seen, Mr Mackelsworth.”

“You mean he dictated everything to his – to that devil?”

“I doubt, Mr Mackelsworth, that your namesake had ever heard of your existence.”

“He could not write to a man he had never heard of, Mr Holmes!”

“Your correspondence, my dear sir, was not with Sir Geoffrey at all, but with the man who lies on the pavement down there. His name, as Doctor Watson has already deduced, is Jean-Pierre Fromental. No doubt he fled to England after the Picayune murders and got in with the Bohemian crowd surrounding Lord Alfred Douglas and others, eventually finding exactly the kind of dupe he was looking for. It is possible he kept his persona of Linda Gallibasta all along. Certainly that would explain why he became so terrified at the thought of being examined by a doctor – you’ll recall the postmistresses words. It is hard to know if he was permanently dressing as a woman – that, after all, is how he had lured his Louisiana victims to their deaths – and whether Sir Geoffrey knew much about him, but clearly he made himself invaluable to his employer and was able, bit by bit, to salt away the remains of the Mackelsworth fortune. But what he really craved, was the Fellini Silver, and that was when he determined the course of action which led to his calculating deception of you, Mr Mackelsworth. He needed a namesake living not far from New Orleans. As an added insurance he invented another cousin. By the simple device of writing to you on Sir Geoffrey’s stationery he built up an entire series of lies, each of which had the appearance of verifying the other. Because, as Linda Gallibasta, he always collected the mail, Sir Geoffrey was never once aware of the deception.”

It was John Macklesworth’s turn to sit down suddenly as realization dawned. “Good heavens, Mr Holmes. Now I understand!”

“Fromental wanted the Fellini Silver. He became obsessed with the notion of owning it. But he knew that if he stole it there was little chance of his ever getting it out of the country. He needed a dupe. That dupe was you, Mr Macklesworth. I regret that you are probably not a cousin of the murdered man. Neither did Sir Geoffrey fear for his Silver. He appears quite reconciled to his poverty and had long since assured that the Fellini Silver would remain in trust for his family or the public forever. In respect of the Silver he was sheltered from all debt by a special covenant with Parliament. There was never a danger of the piece going to his creditors. There was, of course, no way, in those circumstances, that Fromental could get the Silver for himself. He had to engineer first a burglary – and then a murder, which looked like a consequence of that burglary. The suicide note was a forgery, but hard to decipher. His plan was to use your honesty and decency, Mr Macklesworth, to carry the Silver through to America. Then he planned to obtain it from you by any means he found necessary.”

Macklesworth shuddered. “I am very glad I found you, Mr Holmes. If I had not, by coincidence, chosen rooms in Dorset Street, I would even now be conspiring to further that villain’s ends!”

“As, it seems, did Sir Geoffrey. For years he trusted Fromental. He appears to have doted on him, indeed. He was blind to the fact that his estate was being stripped of its remaining assets. He put everything down to his own bad judgement and thanked Fromental for helping him! Fromental had no difficulty, of course, in murdering Sir Geoffrey when the time came. It must have been hideously simple. That suicide note was the only forgery, as such, in the case, gentlemen. Unless, of course, you count the murderer himself.”

Once again, the world had been made a safer and saner place by the astonishing deductive powers of my friend Sherlock Holmes.

Postscript

And that was the end of the Dorset Street affair. The Fellini Silver was taken by the Victoria and Albert Museum who, for some years, kept it in the special “Macklesworth” Wing before it was transferred, by agreement, to the Sir John Soane Museum. There the Macklesworth name lives on. John Macklesworth returned to America a poorer and wiser man. Fromental died in hospital, without revealing the whereabouts of his stolen fortune, but happily a bank book was found at Willesden and the money was distributed amongst Sir Geoffrey’s creditors, so that the house did not have to be sold. It is now in the possession of a genuine Macklesworth cousin. Life soon settled back to normal and it was with some regret that we eventually left Dorset Street to take up residence again at 22lb. I have occasion, even today, to pass that pleasant house and recall with a certain nostalgia the few days when it had been the focus of an extraordinary adventure.

At the start of “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,” which took place in November 1894, Watson refers to his three massive manuscript volumes covering the cases of 1894, and he lists five other cases in addition to the six that had already happened in the first half of the year. Four of those cases tumbled one on top of each other during October and early November, and I present them here without interruption. I must thank the individuals who helped reconstruct these cases.

Barrie Roberts, the tireless delver into matters Sherlockian, spent many years tracking down the clues that allowed him to rebuild the case of the Addleton tragedy. Robert Weinberg is an American bookdealer, collector and writer who has a remarkable talent for finding obscure papers and records. He acquired a batch of notes some years ago and amongst these were early scribblings by Watson on a number of incidental cases, which he later wrote up but did not publish. One of these was the case of Huret the Boulevard assassin, which Mr Weinberg was able to complete with the assistance of Lois Gresh. Stephen Baxter, is a well-known science-fiction writer. His investigations into the early life of H.G. Wells identified the clues that allowed us to reconstruct the forgotten “Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor”. Alert readers will find a passing reference to a red leech suggesting that this story may be the one Watson refers to under that name although, as we shall see, there is another story by that title. Finally Peter Crowther, who hails from Yorkshire, had some remarkable luck only recently in some research he was undertaking for a book on angels, when he came across some old records which enabled him to piece together the case of Crosby the Banker.

The Mystery of the Addleton Curse

Barrie Roberts

It is to the very great credit of my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes that his willingness to enter into an enquiry was never motivated by financial considerations. Indeed, I saw him often reject the possibility of large fees in cases which did not arouse his interest and at least as often I witnessed his involvement for no fee in matters which stimulated his curiosity and offered him the opportunity to pit his logical processes against some complicated pattern of events.

I have remarked elsewhere that 1894 was a busy year for Holmes, my notes of cases filling three large volumes, yet even in that year he took up an enquiry from which he had no hope of profit.

We sat at breakfast one morning that autumn, reading our way slowly through the many daily papers to which Holmes subscribed.

“Did you not say”, he asked suddenly, “that your friend Stamford was treating Sir Andrew Lewis?”

“Yes”, I said, “Stamford told me that he had had to call in Sir William Greedon and even that eminent gentleman was baffled by the symptoms.”

“Really!” said Holmes. “Do you recall what they were?”

I cast my mind back to the conversation I had had with Stamford over a game of billiards a couple of weeks previously.

“Apparently Sir Andrew was the victim of a general debility with lesions of the skin, headaches, fainting spells, loss of hair, attacks of vomiting. In addition the poor fellow’s mind seems to have been affected – he believed he was the victim of a curse.”

“And what did Stamford believe it was?”

“He admitted to me that he hadn’t the least notion. Greedon believed it was some obscure tropical disease that Sir Andrew picked up during his work abroad. Apparently Lewis’s son died in his twenties of something similar, though it took him more swiftly. Greedon thought that they had both been infected abroad and that the son, having caught the disease as a child, was more vulnerable. Why do you ask?”

“Because”, Holmes replied, “the combination of Stamford and Sir William Greedon has failed to save Lewis. His obituary appears this morning,” and he passed me his newspaper.

The article recited the dead man’s academic honours and titles, described some of his more famous archaeological explorations and listed the many museums which displayed items that he had discovered. It referred to the controversy which had clouded his career and caused him to withdraw from public life in recent years.

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed as I drew towards the end of the article, “Perhaps he was the victim of a course.”

“Why do you say so?” asked Holmes, raising one eyebrow.

“Because it is suggested here,” I said, “Listen,” and I read him the relevant passage:

The accusation concerned his conduct during the excavation of an allegedly cursed barrow at Addleton, and must have been the more painful for coming at the time of his son’s death. Sir Andrew made no defence against his attacker, save to state that he acted honourably at Addleton. Fellow archaeologists were unanimous in decrying the attack, but Sir Andrew evidently felt it very deeply, for he took no further part in any excavation, confining himself to writing a definitive series of papers and presenting occasional lectures. The shadow which he at least, perceived as clouding his career now followed by his death from a condition which has defeated the best medical brains in Britain might perhaps encourage the villagers of Addleton to believe that their barrow was truly cursed. Sir Andrew leaves one unmarried daughter.

“What do you make of that?” I asked. “What was the accusation against him?”

“That”, said Holmes, emphatically, “is journalism of a kind that one would hope not to find in an allegedly responsible paper. As to the accusation against Lewis, it was brought by his assistant on the Addleton excavation, one Edgar. He published a letter which raised what he claimed was a mysterious difference between the curious decorations on a sealed container found in the barrow and its contents which, though valuable, were in no way unusual. He contrived to imply, without saying so, that a valuable item had been removed from the container overnight, after it had been discovered and before it had been taken from the excavation.”

“As you have read,” he continued, “the academic world was outraged and supported Lewis to a man. Edgar’s own career certainly suffered. He was well thought of until the Addleton affair but is now, I believe, a lecturer at a suburban institute.” We returned to our newspapers. Holmes was now into the more popular papers, which he read closely for their reports of crimes and accounts of Police Court proceedings. As he finished one he passed it to me and I was turning to the racing page when a heading caught my eye:

the addleton curse death of eminent archaeologist

I started the article out of idle curiosity, but as I read on I became more engrossed.